Why Netflix’s Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Is the Best Evolution of Jurassic Park
Photo Courtesy of Netflix
This essay originally published on June 10, 2022.
Creating a Jurassic Park series aimed for younger viewers seems like a fool’s gamble: You can sell them toys, draw them coloring books, and dress them up in t-shirts bearing the iconic skeletal T-Rex logo, but when you start putting the people and the dinosaurs in motion, you hit Chekhov’s Velociraptor. A big part of the franchise is watching misguided industrialists get karmically devoured by ancient reptiles, and if you decide to abstain from the scary thrills that the series has been building since Steven Spielberg’s masterful first film, it might as well not even be a Jurassic Park installment.
So when you see something like Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, the half hour adventure series that has run for four seasons (its fifth and final one comes this July) on Netflix, your first thought might be “Oh, a more cuddly version of the movies.” It might bring to mind the old Robocop cartoons, which took the violent, genius satire of the 1987 film and filtered it through Saturday morning cartoon tropes (Rad theme song, though.) But the team behind Camp Cretaceous has obviously realized that an approach like that would do a disservice to both older fans who have certain expectations regarding the series and kids that would enjoy some dinosaur antics but are a little young to see it in theaters. And so Camp Cretaceous eliminates the gorier side of things (on screen, anyway) and then pretty much just lets stuff run as usual.
That might seem like a letdown to those who enjoy the chills and restraint of the first film or Spielberg’s glorious slasher flick excess in the second, but Camp Cretaceous understands that the key ingredient to Jurassic Park’s success is a constant feeling of unease, followed by an atmosphere of almost inescapable peril. Developed by X-Men: First Class writer Zack Stentz, the teenagers, abandoned at an adventure camp-esque location on Isla Nublar when Jurassic World goes down, experience every bit of scaly anxiety that their adult counterparts in the live action films do: there is no limit to the amount of things trying to eat them.
When the series begins, it actually takes a few episodes before the concurrent events of Jurassic World begin to happen, meaning that we’re given a chance to breathe and explore Isla Nublar, the beloved island that’s been the home of two-and-a-half films so far. As the series progresses, we get to investigate what the park is actually like and how it’s set up. As someone who is obsessed with the little park details found in things like the original Michael Crichton novel, it’s a treat.
One issue that I’ve had with the Jurassic World trilogy is that its need for spectacle often, ahem, consumes any real emotional momentum or attachment I could have to the characters or scenarios. Centering it around motorcycle-riding, Velociraptor-training tough guy Owen Grady instead of the wary scientists of the original trilogy removes all sense of risk. With him as the protagonist, we don’t ever actually have to worry about anything. He can jump higher, punch harder, and talk to his prehistoric friends better than your average person. He’s a Jurassic World video game character.